After-Life

Today, even though the calendar says mid November, it felt like late summer, as I strolled around the Missouri Botanical Gardens, here in St. Louis. Autumn will soon move to winter and the sparkle of sun on fallen leaves will be a memory. Today is also my 199th post on this blogsite, Prayers Poems and Christian Ponderings – how did that happen I ask myself? Should my 200th blog post be something extraordinary or will it be just another poem and prayer and the invitation to pause and ponder? I feel it will be more the latter than the former. For now though let me complete this 199th post! My journey of searching and finding poetry has taken me to amazing places in the mind’s imagination and along with the “great ” poets of long ago it is such a joy to come across voices very much alive. David Whyte is one such poet. You cannot hurry his poems, rather they demand attention and stillness. They demand honesty and vulnerability. They deliver surprise and astonishment, not with things out there but rather with things inside of the reader, inside of you and me. I will post a poem and the description which Whyte provides from his wonderful book of poems and reflections entitled Still Possible. I ask you to read his words slowly, read them often, pause and ponder and welcome the embrace of surprise and love and the gift to you of grace and mercy.

Beyond Santiago
Death is so simple,
one moment
you are alive
and then,
you are not.

And that fear
you carry with you
might be
equally as simple too,

that you’ll
never have
the time
to accomplish
what you wish.

But stop
a moment now,
before the way
beyond,
and let me
tell you this.

You will go
out of this life
however
untimely,
having completed
every single thing
you wished.

You will
arrive
in that night like
a new born child
welcomed
by
loving arms.

You will find
in that long
anticipated
enemy,
the ultimate form
of forgiveness
and
friendship.

Every
fearful goodbye
suddenly become,
a gentle
getting to know,

a getting to know
of a forgiveness
that was strangely
always anticipated,
a welcome
and a full understanding
of all you ever did,

everything you gave
and everything
you were given,
and then everything
you could never give,
and above all
everything you
could never
bring yourself
to receive,

those unattainable
distances
that always
broke your heart
and the gifted
understanding
of why it was so hard
for you to love,

and then
and most importantly
and right to the heart,

everything you were
and everything you gave,
that was never,
ever, on your list.

If you were to ask me in the busy, lighted hours of the day whether I believed in an after-life I would have to say that I am firmly neutral on the matter, with an accompanying practical sense, passed down from my father’s Yorkshire, that we will all find out soon enough. But every now and again in the deeper states of attention and letting go, necessary to the writing of good poetry, there emerges a physical sense of a deeper and surer foundation in the body: and beneath even that, a voice from an inner, tidal core identity, which displays absolutely no neutrality at all. David Whyte: Beyond Santiago

PRAYER:
Grant to me, lord,
Joy in giving,
Joy in receiving.
Love in-coming,
Love out-flowing.
Peace instilling,
Peace distilling.
Wisdom infilling,
Wisdom outpouring.
Grant to me, Lord,
A rhythm of life.

God who my life sanctified
Jesus Christ who death defied
Spirit ever at my side
From inflowing to ebb tide
From ebbing to inflowing tide Ever with me abide.
Amen. (Ebb and Flow – from Tides and Seasons by David Adam. )